Linux and Enterprise: A Winning Combination

It is clear that Linux is ready to enter the world of enterprise computing in a major way.

Last year, Linux's star began to rise
with many companies announcing Linux support for their products. In
particular, the “Big Three” of database companies, Informix,
Oracle and Sybase, announced ports of their products to Linux. As a
result of these announcements, it is clear that Linux is ready to
enter the world of enterprise computing in a major way. In the
past, large databases were one of the key missing ingredients.

The call for “applications, applications and more
applications” is being answered. Witness the fact that Corel
announced that all of their products will be ported to Linux. Many
of the applications coming out for Linux are freely available and
even Open Source. Need a spreadsheet? Take a look at xxl from the
University of Nice. How about a word processor? Maxwell is an
up-and-coming free software solution still in development and of
course Word Perfect 8 is available from Corel. Even free accounting
software is being developed in Germany under the name
Linux-Kontor.

The other missing ingredient often mentioned is a
user-friendly desktop—Linux now has that, too. KDE is currently
ready for use, and GNOME is not far behind. Both provide that “ol'
black magic” for the desktop.

All the major distributions are working on making
installation and configuration easier. Red Hat and Caldera have had
the easiest installation in the past with the RPM package, but
S.u.S.E. and Debian have also made their installations
easier.

I've spent a lot of time talking to people about why they
chose to port their products to Linux and the answers given were no
surprise. The top three reasons are:

Stability: robustness is always the most desired
attribute of any operating system.

Cost effectiveness: in particular, the fact that
the cost of an operating system does not have to be passed on to
customers.

Support: does this one surprise you? It shouldn't.
With a network of programmers worldwide willing to work on problems
as soon as they are found and announced, Linux support bypasses all
the red tape that comes packaged with commercial products.

Linux has long been number one as far as ISPs and Internet
servers are concerned. A survey by Netcraft in January 1998 showed
that over 50% of all web servers used Apache. The Internet
Operating System Counter at http://www.hzo.cubenet.de/ioscount/ has
polled 810,000 European Internet servers in three different
categories: web servers, FTP servers and news servers. According to
these polls, Linux is the most-used operating system on the
Internet. Linux was number one in each category with a market share
of 26.9% for web servers, 33.7% for FTP servers and 25.7% for news
servers.

With numbers like these and an estimated seven million users,
Linux can no longer be considered “for hackers only”. Therefore,
Linux Journal has decided to publish three
enterprise solution supplements this year, of which this is the
first. In each supplement, we will bring you reviews of new
business applications, articles about how Linux is being used to
solve particular business problems and interviews with business
people who are choosing Linux. Write and let us know what you would
like to see in upcoming supplements.